Chapter Five: The Barn
Ryan would remember, for a long time after this drive was over, the exact moment he understood he was in serious trouble, and it had nothing to do with Marcus Reyes or the black car or the fifty thousand dollars still sitting unanswered on his phone. It had to do with the way Ava laughed at something stupid he'd said about the radio, head tipped back, unguarded, and the way his own chest had done something entirely unauthorized in response.
That was almost sundown. First, there was the phone call.
The name on Ava's screen back at the canyon overlook had been Curtis, the driver who'd taken her to the airfield that first morning, a man she'd known since she was nine years old, and when she finally answered it, hands not quite steady, his voice had come through sounding exactly like it always did, warm and familiar and entirely ordinary.
"Just checking in, kiddo," Curtis had said, easy as anything. "Your dad's been a wreck. Wanted to hear your voice."
Ava had talked to him for exactly ninety seconds, giving nothing away, and hung up with an expression Ryan couldn't quite read, somewhere between relief and a suspicion she wasn't ready to say out loud yet.
Ryan had made his own call an hour later, from the same kind of payphone as the morning before, this one bolted to the wall of a shuttered feed store on the edge of a town too small to have a name he'd remember. His mother answered on the second ring, her voice thin with exhaustion but steady, and told him Maddie's numbers were holding, unchanged, the same careful, unhelpful phrase the doctors used every single day to mean nothing had gotten better and nothing had gotten worse.
"Are you safe," his mother asked, the same question she always asked, and Ryan had said yes, because there was no version of the truth that wouldn't have put more fear into her voice than she already carried, and because, standing in the dark outside a dead town with Ava waiting for him in the truck, he found he mostly believed it.
"Was it him," Ryan asked now, hours later, the two of them parked behind an abandoned barn on a back road Ryan had found by instinct more than any map, the truck's engine ticking as it cooled in the evening air. "The person you thought of, back at the canyon."
"I don't know anymore." Ava pulled her knees up onto the seat, chin resting on them, watching the last orange light drain out of the sky through the windshield. "He sounded normal. He sounded like Curtis. Maybe I'm seeing danger in every corner now because it's easier than admitting I don't actually know who to trust anymore."
She's been circling that fear all day and only just found the words for it. Ryan didn't rush to fill the silence after she said it, letting it sit between them the way it deserved to.
"You trust me."
"That's different." She looked over at him, something soft and unguarded in her expression that hadn't been there at the airfield, hadn't fully been there even in the diner. "You didn't grow up being paid to protect me. You just decided to, somewhere around the time a stranger tried to buy you off with fifty thousand dollars and you said no without even thinking about it."
"I thought about it for exactly one second," Ryan said, "and then I thought about you throwing that coffee, and it stopped being a hard decision at all."
They'd decided, an hour before, that the barn was as safe as anywhere, isolated enough that no one would think to look, close enough to the highway that they could be moving again within minutes if they had to. Ryan had checked every angle of it twice, the way his father had taught him, walking the perimeter in the fading light while Ava sat in the truck with the tire iron across her lap, taking the assignment more seriously than he'd expected her to, watching the tree line without blinking the entire time he was gone. He'd come back to find her exactly where he'd left her, jaw set, ready, and something in that small, stubborn vigilance had made him like her even more than the coffee-throwing had.
"Clear," he'd told her, and watched her shoulders drop half an inch, the tension she'd been carrying since the diner finally allowing itself to ease.
They ate the last of the vending machine dinner sitting in the barn's wide doorway, watching the sky go from gold to bruised purple to a deep, star-scattered black, and it was somewhere in that slow, unhurried dusk that the conversation had turned soft in a way neither of them seemed to be steering on purpose.
"Tell me what your life actually looks like," Ryan said. "Not the version from the magazine profiles. The real one."
"Mostly quiet, honestly. Tutors instead of school, most years, because my father worried about kidnapping risk before any of this actually started, which feels almost funny now." Ava picked at the label on her water bottle, not quite meeting his eyes. "I used to sit at the top of the stairs during his dinner parties and listen to grown men talk about numbers I didn't understand yet, and I used to think, someday, someone's going to want to sit and talk to me instead of at me. I gave up on that a while ago."
"I'm talking to you right now."
"You are." Something in her voice caught, just slightly. "It's new. I don't entirely know what to do with it."
Now they sat together on the tailgate again, the way they had the night before, except something between them had shifted since then, quiet and undeniable, like a held breath finally starting to release.
"Can I tell you something," Ava said, into the deepening dark, "that I haven't told anyone, not even Maren?"
"Yeah."
"I used to practice, when I was younger, imagining what it would feel like if someone actually chose me. Not my father's money, not the company, not the version of me that shows up nicely in a press photo standing next to him. Just me." Her voice had gone quiet, stripped of its earlier sharpness. "I stopped practicing that a few years ago, because it felt like setting myself up to be disappointed by every single person who ever came close."
She's telling you the truest thing about herself, and she's terrified you'll do something with it that proves her right. Ryan felt the weight of that settle into his chest, careful and enormous. "For what it's worth," he said slowly, "I didn't take this job for the money. Not really. I mean, I needed it, I still need it, but somewhere around the second day, if you'd have offered to buy your own way out of my truck, I don't think I would have taken it."
"That's a strange thing to admit to your employer's daughter."
"You stopped feeling like an assignment a while ago," Ryan said. "I don't really know how else to put it."
Ava turned to look at him fully then, the last of the daylight catching the uncertain hope in her face before it disappeared into dusk. "Why not?"
"Because somewhere around the second day, this stopped being just a job." He said it simply, the way he said most things that mattered, without dressing it up in anything fancier than the truth. "I don't know when that happened either. I just know it happened, and I know I'm not in a hurry for it to un-happen."
The space between them on the tailgate had gotten smaller without either of them deciding to close it, and Ava's hand found his in the dark, careful at first and then not careful at all, her fingers threading through his like she'd been wanting to do it for longer than either of them would admit out loud.
"Ryan." His name, in her voice, sounded like a question and an answer at the same time, quiet enough that the desert seemed to lean in to hear it too.
"Yeah."
"I'm really glad it was you my dad picked. Out of everyone he could have hired." Her voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, the desert around them gone fully dark now except for a wash of stars neither of them had noticed arriving. "I know that's a strange thing to be glad about, given everything."
"It's not strange." Ryan's own voice had gone rough in a way he didn't fully recognize. "I'm glad too."
She was close enough now that he could feel the warmth of her, close enough that the careful, sensible distance he'd been keeping since the airfield simply stopped making sense, and when she tipped her face up toward his, some old instinct in him, the same one that had checked her seatbelt without thinking during the chase, understood exactly what she wanted before she said a single word about it.
He kissed her slowly, carefully, like something he was afraid might not be real if he moved too fast, and Ava kissed him back like she'd been waiting her whole life for someone to simply want her instead of what she came with, her free hand finding the front of his shirt and holding on like an anchor.
It was, Ryan would think much later, the first thing in three days that had felt like it belonged entirely to the two of them, and to no one else's danger, no one else's money, no one else's war, a single unclaimed moment carved out of a week that had otherwise belonged to everyone but them.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment afterward, foreheads resting together, her hand still curled in his shirt, and the quiet between them held something neither of them was quite ready to name out loud yet, though both of them, in their own private way, were already fairly certain what it was.
Ava laughed once, softly, disbelieving, and pressed her face briefly into his shoulder. "Of all the ways I imagined this week going," she said, "this was not on the list."
"Same," Ryan admitted, and found he was smiling in a way that felt entirely unfamiliar given everything else happening around them, a small, stubborn pocket of warmth in the middle of a week built almost entirely out of fear. "For the record, I'm not sorry it happened."
"Me neither." She said it simply, and something about the plainness of it, no performance left in her voice at all, made it land harder than any more elaborate declaration could have.
They stayed like that a moment longer, the stars wheeling slow and indifferent overhead, both of them reluctant to let the fragile, borrowed peace of it end, though some old, careful part of Ryan kept listening past her voice, past the sound of his own pulse, out toward the tree line and the dark, empty fields beyond the barn.
It was the crack of a twig somewhere behind the barn, small and ordinary and utterly wrong in a place they'd confirmed was empty twice over, that shattered the moment entirely, both of them going rigid at once, Ryan's hand already moving toward the tire iron he kept wedged behind the seat.
"Stay behind me," he whispered, easing off the tailgate, every soft, unguarded thing from a moment ago folding itself back into the same careful readiness that had gotten them out of the diner alive, his hand tightening around the tire iron until his knuckles ached.
The second crack came closer, deliberate now, someone no longer bothering to move quietly, and a flashlight beam swept across the side of the barn and landed, cold and steady, directly on both of them, pinning them in place like two rabbits caught in the open with nowhere left to run.